Today’s Morning Dump is a tale of two Fiat heirs. No, not Lapo and Ginevra. I’m talking about Stellantis and Ferrari. If you’re an employee of one, you probably just got a humongous bonus. If you’re an employee of the other, well…
I’ve already covered that Stellantis was going to take a huge charge this year to basically wash the Carlos Tavares out of its mouth. Today’s financial reports show a company that’s slowly recovering, but the lack of a bonus is going to be hard for many to swallow, and has less to do with all that nonsense than you’d think. On the other side of what was once FCA, Ferrari sold fewer cars and made more money, so it’s raining euros.
Workers of the world unite! Specifically, Tesla workers unite. Or don’t. It might cost you your job. The solution to all of this? If you sell cars in Europe, it might be China. Which, of course, is also the threat.
I Hope Stellantis Workers At Least Got A Pizza Party
This wasn’t a surprise, if that helps. New Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa already said the company was going to take a $26 billion charge over the company’s bad EV bets, poor quality, movement of engineering out of core offices, and all sorts of other terrible moves by the last guy.
Add it all up, and that, according to Stellantis and Filosa, becomes a major loss for 2025. The first loss in the company’s short existence:
“Our 2025 full year results reflect the cost of over-estimating the pace of the energy transition and of the need to reset our business around our customers’ freedom to choose from the full range of electric, hybrid and internal combustion technologies.”
“In the second half of the year we began to see initial, positive signs of progress with the early results of our drive to improve quality, strong execution of the launches of our new product wave and a return to top line growth. In 2026 our focus will be on continuing to close the execution gaps of the past, adding further momentum to our return to profitable growth.”
The company’s $26.3 billion loss is mostly due to that write-down. Did a large number of workers ask Stellantis to ship engineering jobs overseas? To get into a fight with its suppliers? To invest in EVs over hybrids? So far as I can tell, the workers did not.
While bonuses are down this year, UAW members at Ford will get roughly $6,800, and GM employees should pocket somewhere around $10,000. Stellantis workers will get nothing, and that’s probably a lot more due to tariffs, although all the bad product choices aren’t helping, as Automotive News reports:
Stellantis’ contract with the UAW pays $900 for every 1 percent of North American profit margin. For 2025, the company lost $2.2 billion in North America, for a margin of negative 3.1 percent.
“It is clear that 2025 was a very challenging year for Stellantis, reflecting the cost of a profound and necessary business reset to correct past decisions,” Stellantis said in a statement. “As the North America results did not meet the minimum thresholds defined in the 2023 UAW collective bargaining agreement, there will be no profit sharing paid to UAW-represented employees for 2025.”
[…]
Tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump are among the reasons Stellantis’ margin evaporated in North America last year. The company had estimated its 2025 tariff bill to be $1.4 billion.
Presumably, without tariffs, the company might have found a way to make some sort of profit. Either way, it wasn’t going to be a great year for workers.
Ferrari Workers Get Up To $18,000 In Bonus
It was almost exactly 10 years ago that Ferrari was officially split off from FCA, ahead of its eventual transformation into Stellantis. Ferrari’s fate has done nothing but improve in the years since.
Just ask the workers!
Per Yahoo! Finance:
The company’s financial performance triggered what Ferrari calls a competitive annual award for its workforce in Italy. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Benedetto Vigna confirmed that eligible employees could receive up to €14,900, or nearly $18,000 at current exchange rates. Approximately 5,000 people work for Ferrari in Italy. The bonus reflects the automaker’s focus on high-margin vehicles rather than overall production volume, a strategy that continues to drive profitability even when shipment totals fluctuate slightly year over year.
That’s a lotta tagliatelle al ragù battuto al coltello.
Tesla CEO Seems To Imply Repercussions If German Workers Switch Unions: Report
If you weren’t there, it’s hard to explain how super weird the TV show Dinosaurs was. Imagine All In The Family meets Jurassic Park. I guess? One of the best bits was that there was a show-within-the-show called Tricera-Cops and, for whatever reason, it does an extended bit about Marxism. You can see it at the end of this clip.
“You’ve been disenfranchised by the bourgeois power structure!”
Hilarious.
Anyway, Tesla has a unionized plant in Europe, because basically everything in Europe is unionized. The catch is that, instead of the typical IG Metall organization you’d find at a VW plant, the GigaBerlin factory has its own, quasi-management-supported workers council.
There’s an election coming up, and IG Metall wants in. This is, as Manager Magazin reports, where it gets weird:
Police operation at Tesla, charges of wiretapping, public prosecutor’s office investigating plant manager: The recent incidents at the Tesla factory in Grünheide sound almost too absurd to be true. In fact, however, they are the result of a long-standing dispute between the employer and the IG Metall union , which has escalated increasingly in recent weeks.
Both sides are ultimately concerned with employee participation in the company. Next week, from March 2nd to 4th, works council elections will take place at the Gigafactory for the third time. For the first time, the automaker in Brandenburg could have a works council led by a majority of union members.
It’s not a good time there, and if you ask some of the workers, they claim the current union is just a rubber stamp for management. If you ask the leadership of the current union, the outsiders are jerks trying to cause trouble.
What does CEO Elon Musk say? According to an article in Spiegel Business and Handelsblatt, he’s unsurprisingly siding with the current worker council. Here are the important quotes from the CEO:
Things certainly become more difficult when there are, so to speak, external organizations pushing Tesla in the wrong direction,” the CEO said in a video message to employees. “We won’t close the factory, but realistically, we won’t expand it either.”
Yeah, given how poor sales are in Europe, I can’t see Tesla expanding the plant for any reason.
BMW Might Import Cheap Minis To Europe Via China
With the EU walking back anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese automakers on a case-by-case basis, there might be an opening for Mini to import Chinese-built EVs to Europe at a lower and more reasonable price.
BMW and the European Commission are in talks about a possible minimum pricing model that could replace EU tariffs on the German carmaker’s Chinese-made Mini electric vehicles, Germany’s Handelsblatt business daily reported on Tuesday.
This follows an agreement struck between Brussels and Volkswagen earlier in February, under which the group’s SEAT/Cupra brand secured a tariff exemption for its all-electric Tavascan SUV coupe following months of discussions. Similar deals could follow, with Chinese carmakers also thought to be eyeing exemptions for their EU-bound EVs.
If you can’t beat’em, import’em.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
People are loving the KATSEYE, so enjoy some “Gabriela,” which is like a K-Pop “Jolene.”
The Big Question
Which automaker employees will get the biggest bonus for 2026?
Top photo: Warner Bros
The post Dodge, Jeep, And Ram Workers Get $0 Bonuses After Tariffs, Poor Sales Take Bite Out Of Profits appeared first on The Autopian.
